With the ADA marking its 25th anniversary and President Obama signing the Steve Gleason Act into law, it’s been quite a week for the nation. Let this week’s AT news articles reflect how far we’ve come in 25 years of this landmark civil rights legislation. AT in the news for 7/25 thru 7/31.

The National Federation of the Blind Center of Excellence and the Maryland Technology Assistance Program present

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Access to Commerce, Public Information, and Education (CENA) and the Maryland Technology Assistance Program are proud to announce that we will be hosting another Web Accessibility Training Day on November 4, 2015.

This year, we are expanding both the technical and the policy tracks to pack more content that fits your needs into the day. Whether you are wondering how to implement accessibility in education, curious about the Section 508 update, or wanting to learn more about how to test for web accessibility, we’ve got you covered.

Come learn with us!

The event will be conducted as part of the NFB Center of Excellence in Nonvisual Access to Education, Public Information, and Commerce, as part of its training initiative. The Center of Excellence serves to share the considerable knowledge that the NFB and its partners have of web accessibility in order to bring about greater accessibility in government, education, and business; to promote best practices nationally; and to build Maryland’s status as leader in the field.

NVDA Remote has landed!

Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP

Remote access to another computer has been commonplace for years–that is if a screen reader is not required. In an office environment, this means trouble shooting another machine or system administration duties are impossible if assistive technology is required.

Now there is a simple, reliable, and free solution to this significant accessibility barrier. The fine developers of open-source screen reader NVDA have coordinated a crowd-funding campaign to develop NVVDA Remote. This add-on to NVDA has now been released and it delivers on its promise.

After obtaining the NVDA Remote package from nvdaremote.com, I quickly installed the software and restarted NVDA. A new option under the “Tools” menu called “Remote”, is now available. The simple directions accompanying the NVDA Remote plug-in had me connected to another computer in just about 3 minutes. I was startled when the synthetic speech on both machines started responding to my keystrokes–it was just slightly out of sync, which produced a spine-tingling chill. That’s an undocumented feature.

A few additional features are also available, like the ability to “push” the contents of the clipboard to the remote machine or issue a “Ctrl-Alt-Del” key sequence remotely. As the code is freely available, I expect many future improvements.

Editors Note: A previous version of this post attributed the development of this product to NVAccess; however, this is an independent project, separate from NVAccess.

If a fire breaks out, it can be a really dangerous thing. In fact, more than 3,400 people are killed by fires every single year and more than 16,000 people are injured. When it comes to fires, kids and people living with disabilities are especially at risk as there are often circumstances that may make it hard to flee the place. A person in a wheelchair whose mobility is limited will have a tough time getting out of a building if it requires him or her taking the stairs in the event of a fire. On the other hand, people with significant cognitive impairment may not be conscious about how to best handle the situation and may not know what to do in case the fire alarm goes off. To help spread awareness, SplitLevel has published an infographic for people with disabilities and their caregivers that explains how to prevent fire, how to stay prepared and what to do afterwards. This infographic easily explains the steps needed to be taken if you know of someone with any kind of disability.

We’re just two days away from the 25th anniversary of the ADA! Celebrations abound all over the place, including Washington DC and right here in Baltimore. The below articles are testament to the strides that have been made and documentation on all that still needs to be achieved…AT in the news for the week of 7/20 thru 7/24